Jack Read online

  He found me. I had gone back to the post and waited till everyone was asleep and Mrs Lucy had gone upstairs and then sneaked into the pantry to look up Jack’s address in Mrs Lucy’s files. It had not been there, as I had known it wouldn’t. And if there had been an address, what would it have turned out to be when I went to find it? A gutted house? A mound of rubble?

  I had gone to Sloane Square Station, knowing he wouldn’t be there, but having no other place to look. He could have been anywhere. London was full of empty houses, bombed-out cellars, secret places to hide until it got dark. That was why he had come here.

  “If I was a bad’un, I’d come straight to London,” Swales had said. But the criminal element weren’t the only ones who had come, drawn by the blackout and the easy pickings and the bodies. Drawn by the blood.

  I stood there until it started to get dark, watching two boys scrabble in the gutter for candy that had been blown out of a confectioner’s front window, and then walked back to a doorway down the street from the post, where I could see the door, and waited. The sirens went. Swales left on patrol. Petersby went in. Morris came out, stopping to peer at the sky as if he were looking for his son Quincy. Mrs Lucy must not have managed to talk Nelson out of the patrols.

  It got dark. The searchlights began to criss-cross the sky, catching the silver of the barrage balloons. The planes started coming in from the east, a low hum. Vi hurried in, wearing high heels and carrying a box tied with string. Petersby and Twickenham left on patrol. Vi came out, fastening her helmet strap under her chin and eating something.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Jack said.

  I turned around. He had driven up in a lorry marked ATS. He had left the door open and the motor running. “I’ve got the beams,” he said. “For reinforcing the post. The incident we were on last night, all these beams were lying on top, and I asked the owner of the house if I could buy them from him.”

  He gestured to the back of the lorry, where jagged ends of wood were sticking out. “Come along then, we can get them up tonight if we hurry.” He started towards the truck. “Where were you? I’ve looked everywhere for you.”

  “I went to St George’s Hospital,” I said.

  He stopped, his hand on the open door of the truck.

  “Mina’s dead,” I said, “but you knew that, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “The nurse said she died of loss of blood,” I said. A flare drifted down, lighting his face with a deadly whiteness. “I know what you are.”

  “If we hurry, we can get the reinforcements up before the raid starts,” he said. He started to pull the door to.

  I put my hand on it to keep him from closing it. “War work,” I said bitterly. “What do you do, make sure you’re alone in the tunnel with them or go to see them in hospital afterwards?”

  He let go of the door.

  “Brilliant stroke, volunteering for the ARP,” I said. “Nobody’s going to suspect the noble air-raid warden, especially when he’s so good at locating casualties. And if some of those casualties die later, if somebody’s found dead on the street after a raid, well, it’s only to be expected. There’s a war on.”

  The drone overhead got suddenly louder, and a whole shower of flares came down. The searchlights wheeled, trying to find the planes. Jack took hold of my arm.

  “Get down,” he said, and tried to drag me into the doorway.

  I shook his arm off. “I’d kill you if I could,” I said. “But I can’t, can I?” I waved my hand at the sky. “And neither can they. Your sort don’t die, do they?”

  There was a long swish, and the rising scream. “I will kill you, though,” I shouted over it. “If you touch Vi or Mrs Lucy.”

  “Mrs Lucy,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he said it with astonishment or contempt.

  “Or Vi or any of the rest of them. I’ll drive a stake through your heart or whatever it takes,” I said, and the air fell apart.

  There was a long sound like an enormous monster growling. It seemed to go on and on. I tried to put my hands over my ears, but I had to hang on to the road to keep from falling. The roar became a scream, and the pavement shook itself sharply, and I fell off.

  “Are you all right?” Jack said.

  I was sitting next to the lorry, which was on its side. The beams had spilled out the back. “Were we hit?” I said.

  “No,” he said, but I already knew that, and before he had finished pulling me to my feet, I was running towards the post that we couldn’t see for the dust.

  Mrs Lucy had told Nelson having everyone out on patrol would mean no one could be found in an emergency, but that was not true. They were all there within minutes, Swales and Morris and Violet, clattering up in her high heels, and Petersby. They ran up, one after the other, and then stopped and looked stupidly at the space that had been Mrs Lucy’s house, as if they couldn’t make out what it was.

  “Where’s Renfrew?” Jack said.

  “In Birmingham,” Vi said.

  “He wasn’t here,” I explained. “He’s on sick leave.” I peered through the smoke and dust, trying to see their faces. “Where’s Twickenham?”

  “Here,” he said.

  “Where’s Mrs Lucy?” I said.

  “Over here,” Jack said, and pointed down into the rubble.

  We dug all night. Two different rescue squads came to help. They called down every half-hour, but there was no answer. Vi borrowed a light from somewhere, draped a blue headscarf over it, and set up as incident officer. An ambulance came, sat a while, left to go to another incident, came back. Nelson took over as incident officer, and Vi came back up to help. “Is she alive?” she asked.

  “She’d better be,” I said, looking at Jack.

  It began to mist. The planes came over again, dropping flares and incendiaries, but no one stopped work. Twickenham’s typewriter came up in the baskets, and one of Mrs Lucy’s wine glasses. It began to get light. Jack looked vaguely up at the sky.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  At around three Morris thought he heard something, and we stopped and called down, but there was no answer. The mist turned into a drizzle. At a half past four I shouted to Mrs Lucy, and she called back, from far underground, “I’m here.”

  “Are you all right?” I shouted.

  “My leg’s hurt. I think it’s broken,” she shouted, her voice calm. “I seem to be under the table.”

  “Don’t worry,” I shouted. “We’re nearly there.”

  The drizzle turned the plaster dust into a slippery, disgusting mess. We had to brace the tunnel repeatedly and cover it with a tarpaulin, and then it was too dark to see to dig. Swales lay above us, holding a pocket torch over our heads so we could see. The all-clear went.

  “Jack!” Mrs Lucy called up.

  “Yes!” I shouted.

  “Was that the all-clear?”

  “Yes,” I shouted. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you out soon now.”

  “What time is it?”

  It was too dark in the tunnel to see my watch. I made a guess. “A little after five.”

  “Is Jack there?”

  “Yes.”

  “He mustn’t stay,” she said. “Tell him to go home.”

  The rain stopped. We ran into one and then another of the oak beams that had reinforced the landing on the fourth floor and had to saw through them. Swales reported that Morris had called Nelson “a bloody murderer”. Vi brought us paper cups of tea.

  We called down to Mrs Lucy, but there wasn’t any answer. “She’s probably dozed off,” Twickenham said, and the others nodded as if they believed him.

  We could smell the gas long before we got to her, but Jack kept on digging, and like the others, I told myself that she was all right, that we would get to her in time.

  She was not under the table after all, but under part of the pantry door. We had to call for a jack to get it off her. It took Morris a long ti
me to come back with it, but it didn’t matter. She was lying perfectly straight, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Her left leg had been taken off at the knee. Jack knelt beside her and cradled her head.

  “Keep your hands off her,” I said.

  I made Swales come down and help get her out. Vi and Twickenham put her on the stretcher. Petersby went for the ambulance. “She was never a horrid person, you know,” Morris said. “Never.”

  It began to rain again, the sky so dark it was impossible to tell whether the sun had come up yet or not. Swales brought a tarp to cover Mrs Lucy.

  Petersby came back. “The ambulance has gone off again,” he said. “I’ve sent for the mortuary van, but they said they doubt they can be here before half past eight.”

  I looked at Jack. He was standing over the tarp, his hands slackly at his sides. He looked worse than Renfrew ever had, impossibly tired, his face grey with wet plaster dust. “We’ll wait,” I said.

  “There’s no point in all of us standing here in the rain for two hours,” Morris said. “I’ll wait here with the… I’ll wait here. Jack,” he turned to him, “go and report to Nelson.”

  “I’ll do it,” Vi said. “Jack needs to get to his day job.”

  “Is she up?” Nelson said. He clambered over the fourth-floor beams to where we were standing. “Is she dead?” He glared at Morris and then at my hat, and I wondered if he were going to reprimand me for the condition of my uniform.

  “Which of you found her?” he demanded.

  I looked at Jack. “Settle did,” I said. “He’s a regular wonder. He’s found six this week alone.”

  Two days after Mrs Lucy’s funeral, a memo came through from Civil Defence transferring Jack to Nelson’s post, and I got my official notice to report for duty. I was sent to basic training and then on to Portsmouth. Vi sent me food packets, and Twickenham posted me copies of his Twitterings.

  The post had relocated across the street from the butcher’s in a house belonging to a Miss Arthur, who had subsequently joined the post. “Miss Arthur loves knitting and flower arranging and will make a valuable addition to our brave little band,” Twickenham had written. Vi had got engaged to a pilot in the RAF. Hitler had bombed Birmingham. Jack, in Nelson’s post now, had saved sixteen people in one week, a record for the ARP.

  After two weeks I was shipped to North Africa, out of the reach of the mails. When I finally got Morris’s letter, it was three months old. Jack had been killed while rescuing a child at an incident. A delayed-action bomb had fallen nearby, but “that bloody murderer Nelson” had refused to allow the rescue squad to evacuate. The DA had gone off, the tunnel Jack was working in had collapsed, and he’d been killed. They had got the child out, though, and she was unhurt except for a few cuts.

  But he isn’t dead, I thought. It’s impossible to kill him. I had tried, but even betraying him to von Nelson hadn’t worked, and he was still somewhere in London, hidden by the blackout and the noise of the bombs and the number of dead bodies, and who would notice a few more?

  In January I helped take out a tank battalion at Tobruk. I killed nine Germans before I caught a piece of shrapnel. I was shipped to Gibraltar to hospital, where the rest of my mail caught up with me. Vi had got married, the raids had let up considerably, Jack had been awarded the George Cross posthumously.

  In March I was sent back to hospital in England for surgery. It was near North Weald, where Morris’s son Quincy was stationed. He came to see me after the surgery. He looked the very picture of an RAF pilot, firm-jawed, steely-eyed, rakish grin, not at all like a delinquent minor. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, he told me, “giving Hitler a bit of our own back”.

  “I hear you’re to get a medal,” he said, looking at the wall above my head as if he expected to see violets painted there, nine of them, one for each kill.

  I asked him about his father. He was fine, he told me. He’d been appointed senior warden. “I admire you ARP people,” he said, “saving lives and all that.”

  He meant it. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, reducing their cities to rubble, creating incidents for their air-raid wardens to scrabble through looking for dead children. I wondered if they had body-sniffers there, too, and if they were monsters like Jack.

  “Dad wrote to me about your friend Jack,” Quincy said. “It must have been rough, hearing so far away from home and all.”

  He looked genuinely sympathetic, and I supposed he was. He had shot down twenty-eight planes and killed who knows how many fat women in hairnets and thirteen-year-old girls, but no one had ever thought to call him a monster. The Duchess of York had called him the pride of England and kissed him on both cheeks.

  “I went with Dad to Vi Westren’s wedding,” he said. “Pretty as a picture she was.”

  I thought of Vi, with her pincurls and her plain face. It was as though the war had transformed her into someone completely different, someone pretty and sought-after.

  “There were strawberries and two kinds of cake,” he said. “One of the wardens—Tottenham?—read a poem in honour of the happy couple. Wrote it himself.”

  It was as if the war had transformed Twickenham as well, and Mrs Lucy, who had been the terror of the churchwardens. What the War Has Done for Us. But it hadn’t transformed them. All that was wanted was for someone to give Vi a bit of attention for all her latent sweetness to blossom. Every girl is pretty when she knows she’s sought after.

  Twickenham had always longed to be a writer. Nelson had always been a bully and a stickler, and Mrs Lucy, in spite of what she said, had never been either. “Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one’s proper job,” she’d said.

  Like Quincy, who had been, in spite of what Morris said, a bad boy, headed for a life of petty crime or worse, when the war came along. And suddenly his wildness and daring and “high spirits” were virtues, were just what was needed.

  What the War Has Done For Us. Number Two. It has made jobs that didn’t exist before. Like post warden. Like body-sniffer.

  “Did they find Jack’s body?” I asked, though I knew the answer. No, Quincy would say, we couldn’t find it, or there was nothing left.

  “Didn’t Dad tell you?” Quincy said with an anxious look at the transfusion bag hanging above the bed. “They had to dig past him to get to the little girl. It was pretty bad, Dad said. The blast from the DA had driven the leg of a chair straight through his chest.”

  So I had killed him after all. Nelson and Hitler and me.

  “I shouldn’t have told you that,” Quincy said, watching the blood drip from the bag into my veins as if it were a bad sign. “I know he was a friend of yours. I wouldn’t have told you only Dad said to tell you yours was the last name he said before he died. Just before the DA went up. ‘Jack,’ he said, like he knew what was going to happen, Dad said, and called out your name.”

  He didn’t though, I thought. And “that bloody murderer Nelson” hadn’t refused to evacuate him. Jack had just gone on working, oblivious to Nelson and the DA, stabbing at the rubble as though he were trying to murder it, calling out “saw” and “wire cutters” and “braces”. Calling out “jack”. Oblivious to everything except getting them out before the gas killed them, before they bled to death. Oblivious to everything but his job.

  I had been wrong about why he had joined the ARP, about why he had come to London. He must have lived a terrible life up there in Yorkshire, full of darkness and self-hatred and killing. When the war came, when he began reading of people buried in the rubble, of rescue wardens searching blindly for them, it must have seemed a godsend. A blessing.

  It wasn’t, I think, that he was trying to atone for what he’d done, for what he was. It’s impossible, at any rate. I had only killed ten people, counting Jack, and had helped rescue nearly twenty, but it doesn’t cancel out. And I don’t think that was what he wanted. What he had wanted was to be useful.

  “Here
’s to making the best of a bad job,” Mrs Lucy had said, and that was all any of them had been doing: Swales with his jokes and gossip, and Twickenham, and Jack, and if they found friendship or love or atonement as well, it was no less than they deserved. And it was still a bad job.

  “I should be going,” Quincy said, looking worriedly at me. “You need your rest, and I need to be getting back to work. The German army’s halfway to Cairo, and Yugoslavia’s joined the Axis.” He looked excited, happy. “You must rest, and get well. We need you back in this war.”

  “I’m glad you came,” I said.

  “Yes, well, Dad wanted me to tell you that about Jack calling for you.” He stood up. “Tough luck, your getting it in the neck like this.” He slapped his flight cap against his leg. “I hate this war,” he said, but he was lying.

  “So do I,” I said.

  “They’ll have you back killing jerries in no time,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He put his cap on at a rakish angle and went off to bomb lecherous retired colonels and children and widows who had not yet managed to get reinforcing beams out of the Hamburg Civil Defence and paint violets on his plane. Doing his bit.

  A sister brought in a tray. She had a large red cross sewn to the bib of her apron.

  “No, thanks, I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “You must keep your strength up,” she said. She set the tray beside the bed and went out.

  “The war’s been rather a blessing for our Vi,” I had told Jack, and perhaps it was. But not for most people. Not for girls who worked at John Lewis’s for old stewpots who never let them leave early even when the sirens had gone. Not for those people who discovered hidden capabilities for insanity or betrayal or bleeding to death. Or murder.

  The sirens went. The nurse came in to check my transfusion and take the tray away. I lay there for a long time, watching the blood come down into my arm.

  “Jack,” I said, and didn’t know who I called out to, or if I had made a sound.

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